The case of a former Lomita restaurant owner who told sheriff’s detectives he bound his wife with duct tape, panicked when he found she was dead and “cooked” her body for four days to get rid of her remains has been given to a jury to deliberate.

A Lomita chef on trial for his wife’s murder told sheriff’s investigators that they couldn’t find his wife’s body because he had slow-cooked it for days in boiling water until little was left but her skull.

Investigators ended their search at a California restaurant on Wednesday for the body of a missing woman whose husband jumped off a cliff days earlier upon learning he was a suspect in her disappearance.